The Adversary by Reece Hirsch (Thomas & Mercer, $14.95, 382 pages)
Attorney Chris Bruen is the central character in this, author Reece Hirsch’s second thriller. The timing of the premise couldn’t be better; cybercrimes are rampant as of this reviewer’s read. Between the Target credit card debacle over Christmas 2013 and the outing of the National Security Agency by Edward Snowden, the believability of this story is high.
Chris Bruen is an intellectual property attorney whose career path has moved him from being a federal Department of Justice prosecutor for computer crimes to private practice in San Francisco, California where he has traded public service for greater pay. His work is basically the same; although his clients are in the private sector.
The client paying for Bruen’s time and expertise this time around is BlueCloud, a giant in the operating systems universe. While in the short term a dead hacker in Amsterdam halts his search for the company’s problems, the trail that opens up provides Bruen with nearly unlimited challenges. The cast of characters expands as the plot thickens. There are constant reminders of shifting values and allegiances among the people he must move to arrive at a solution to BlueCloud’s dilemma.
Along the way, Gruen visits many locales in addition to Amsterdam, including Barcelona and Paris. Everywhere he goes doubt and suspicion are his companions. The tech talk used by the characters seems reasonable and its accuracy appears to be spot on. The shifting scale of universality of technology is a stark contrast to the scale of warfare raged among a small number of human troops that dominate the world in which Bruen labors.
Author Hirsch keeps the pace moving smartly with mounting tension and lurking evil. Although Bruen’s cancer diagnosis reveal in the early pages of the book plants a seed of doubt for the reader, it is hopefully not the last we see of him as he is an entirely agreeable character. Please keep us supplied with new stories Reece Hirsch, Esq.
Highly recommended.
Ruta Arellano
“Reece Hirsch is writing and running with the big boys.” John Lescroart, New York Times bestselling author.
A review copy was provided by the author. Reece Hirsch is also the author of The Insider: A Novel.
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